INTRODUCTION

charming songs. His feeling for Clarinda was probably based on vanity, was literary in essence, though with a fine woman he could not avoid being amorous. Man is a polygamous animal, and Burns was extremely human. His innumerable love affairs easily effaced each other, and of constancy he was, or became, constitutionally incapable. It is to his credit that he did not evolve a Shelleyan theory of free love. But Burns had, what Shelley had not, a strong sense of humour. He was as married as a Scot can be, before the end of April, 1788. Honour demanded no less, and he gallantly made the best of it. Mrs Burns thoroughly understood him, and, even if her heart was elsewhere, gallantly made the best of it also. There is no wiser rule of life given mortalibus aegris.

If Burns was not writing Georgics, he was reading Virgil, in Dryden. His criticisms on a Virgil only known through a translation are exactly what might be expected. He prefers (he tells Mrs Dunlop) the Georgics to the Æneid, in which he thinks the Mantuan "a servile copier of Homer." The two kinds of epic are disparate, and, unfortunately, Burns was shut out from "all the charm of all the Muses flowering often in some lonely word" of the original Latin. As he could only judge between translations, he naturally supposed that his criticism was unbiassed by the relative merit of interpreters.

It is superfluous to lament over the gaugership which Burns had obtained, or to ask what could have been done for him. He was far, in Scotland, from the fountains of literary patronage. To be, like Dr Johnson, the pensioner of an usurper, of "an idiot race," was, and should have been, to a Jacobite, or a Jacobin, impossible, had the offer come in his way. "I look to the Excise scheme as a certainty of maintenance. A maintenance!-luxury to what either Mrs Burns or I was born to." At Ellisland he had the society of the Riddells, and was not without books. Songs and occasional pieces he wrote; an imitation of Pope's Epistles, which he began, was not a good imitation. His was not a polished urban muse, her "pinion" had no "strength" in that way. In 1788, while the country was celebrating the centenary of that auspicious event, the Revolution of 1688, Burns, in a letter to a London paper, bade "every man who has a tear for the many miseries incident to humanity, feel for a family

ROBERT BURNS

illustrious as any in Europe, and unfortunate beyond historic precedent." He expressed no emotion here, which was unfamiliar to either of the two last of the Four Georges. Among their qualities sympathy for their exiled cousins, and for their loyal adherents, was not the least amiable.

Even in 1788, with "a wife o' his ain," and a farm, Burns was not contented. He complains (Dec. 17) of the "miry ridges and dirty dunghills" which engross the "best part of the functions my soul immortal." He was following his plough, but no longer "in glory and in joy." He enclosed "Auld Lang Syne," the most popular of all his pieces, writing of it as if it were traditional. The refrain and movement are old, but that is all.

of

The year 1789 was mainly remarkable for a variety of poems, from the celebration of the WHISTLE, and "Willie brewed a peck o' maut" to "Mary in Heaven," and the excellent lines on Grose, the antiquary. The farm went ill, and the expenses of journeying, as an exciseman, were considerable. In 1790, Burns, in addition to song writing, meditated a Scotch drama on a humorous incident in the. adventures of Robert Bruce. Much of the charm of the Waverley novels might have been anticipated had Burns persevered. His chief poem of this year, Tam o' Shanter, was composed for Captain Grose, the antiquary, and first published in his Antiquities of Scotland. Burns is said to have thought this the best of his works, and he was no poor self-critic. A genius of a different cast might have made that terrible, which Burns has preferred to treat as grotesque. Thus, in Scott's hands, we might have found the legend becoming a parallel to Wandering Willie's Story. But Burns was too much a child of the eighteenth century to feel the terrible, in rural legends, and nobody can wish Tam o' Shanter to be other than it is, though all must regret that it did not become the first in a series of humorous tales. Burns, in fact, had once more "found himself," and his rich vein, but he left the vein unexplored. By the middle of the following year (1791) Burns's farm had ceased to be other than a burden to him, and Chambers detects, in his letters, "a chronic exasperation of spirit," which he attributes to Burns's usual passions, and the humiliations to which they led. Poverty, one might suppose (as Burns himself often

INTRODUCTION

says), was enough to account for "chronic exasperation." Had Burns been in Byron's social position, he would probably have been no more contented than Childe Harold, but his want of money, and his ambiguous social position, might have fretted one less sensitive. In November, 1790, Burns quitted his farm for ever. He had established a library among his rural neighbours, and he left, we learn, a puttingstone, most of his little capital, and an immortal tradition. He migrated to Dumfries, which was his home till his death.

Dumfries, even now, seems a rural and rather pretty town to eyes familiar with the endless ugliness of London. The Nith flows very near Dumfries, through a green and placid landscape; there are beautiful remains of ecclesiastical antiquity, such as the ruins of Lincluden Church, and in his rides Burns must have seen many varieties of hill, moor, burn, loch, and river. The change from the free atmosphere of a farmhouse to a small tenement in the Wee Vennel, probably dark and dirty, may not have affected either Burns or Mrs Burns so much as poetic souls might expect. In Edinburgh Burns does not grumble at the accommodation of Baxter's Close. Most women, especially in Mrs Burns's class, prefer a town, with its movement and its neighbourly gossips, to the loneliness of a country life. Burns, too, was fond of society, and he found plenty of it in or near Dumfries, through which travellers from or to England were wont to pass. Robert Chambers, who came from Peebles, the proverbial capital of "pleesure and deevilment," draws an unalluring sketch of the conviviality of such towns. "Insipid toasts, petty raillery, empty gabble about trivial occurrences, endless disputes on small questions of fact, where an almanac or a dictionary would have settled all; those, relieved by a song when it was to be had, formed the staple of convivial life, as I remember it, in such places in my own younger days." But, when Burns was in Dumfries, talk must have been much concerned with the French Revolution, no trivial theme. He, in his black mood, welcomed the stimulus of wine and company, and could unseat Atra Cura for an hour or a night. The local gentry were hospitable, and, unluckily, were very hard drinkers. Burns had a friend in Mrs Riddell, a very young and pleasing matron, who herself wrote and even rhymed.

ROBERT BURNS

Society, indeed, there was, and even too much of it. Burns might have applied himself more seriously to literature either in a great town like London, where a man, if he chooses, can avoid conviviality, or in a lonely farm. But, what with his duties as an exciseman, what with convivialities which he could not refuse to share, serious application to literature was out of the question. He kept pouring forth songs to Scotch airs, and what he regarded as epigrams. Among the best of the songs are— "Ye Jacobites by Name," "Kenmure," "Saw Ye Bonie Lesley," "Duncan Gray," "Auld Rob Morris," "It was a' for our Rightfu' King," "Scots wha hae," and, best of all, "Ae fond kiss."

Had Burns written nothing else, these alone would have sufficed for fame as a national lyrist.

66

The whole of the Dumfries period may be looked on as unfortunate. Burns had a meeting with Clarinda, who was rejoining her husband in Jamaica, and his fancy for her grew into a passion, expressed in letters, in one of his worst English pieces on "Sensibility," in his finest love-song, "Ae fond kiss before we sever," and in other verses. Mrs Riddell also engaged his heart, as "The last time I cam' o'er the moor" proves, not very agreeably, for Mr Riddell is spoken of as my rival" in one version. But even in a poet so frankly personal as Burns a song may be no expression of a real emotion, but a dramatic lyric of a situation suggested to his fancy. By no great fault of Burns, but by the barbarous conviviality of the age and district, he was led into an act of rudeness towards Mrs Riddell. His apologies in prose and verse were not accepted, and he had the bad taste to lampoon her and her husband. Scott once "excited indignation in the heart of Mr Alexander Peterkin," as Lockhart says, by remarking that Burns's spirit, indignation, and dignity were "those of a high-souled plebeian, untinged with the slightest shade of that spirit of chivalry which, since the feudal times, has pervaded the higher ranks of European society." If Burns, after offending a Captain Dods by a toast which the captain considered offensive, did not "go out" with that officer, Burns acted like a man of sense. A husband and

father, in a non-duelling rank of life, for him to meet his foe "where the muir-cock was bailie" would have been wrong and absurd. But for Burns to pin a spiteful quotation on

INTRODUCTION

Mrs Riddell's carriage was undeniably not chivalrous, and men in his own social rank would have agreed in condemning the insult. In an equal the offence would have been taken up by the husband, Mr Riddell, in the usual way, but with Burns Mr Riddell could not fight, for Burns would not have fought. So far Scott was right, but he apparently exaggerated, and need never have mentioned, a story of a dramatic folly of Burns's with a swordcane. With Mrs Riddell he was reconciled before his death. Other men, and better born, have been hurried in celeres iambos, by irritation against women, estranged friends or mistresses; for example, La Rochefoucauld, whose traditions were "chivalrous." The affair is to be regretted, and doubtless the cackle of a country town caused most of the mischief.

In addition to Clarinda, and Mrs Riddell, amours which are not to the credit of Burns's heart or taste, vulgar intrigues to which he gave publicity by scratching songs to his mistress on the window of the tavern where she lived, are said to have embittered his life in Dumfries. His political sentiments were reported to his official superiors, and this caused him much anxiety. Similar freedom of speech, in his admired France, if displayed on the unpopular side, would have lost him his head. If his friends among the country gentry now looked coldly on him, nobody can wonder at it. His occasional excesses in wine they were accomplices in; his lampoons, his politics, and the publicity of his last love affairs could not conciliate their prejudices, or confirm their esteem. Early in 1795, Burns joined a volunteer corps, and by his song "The Dumfries Volunteers" probably recovered much of the good will which his Gallophile sentiments had lost. Nor did he abandon his Jacobite tastes. He acquired Balmerino's dirk, and took pleasure in the interesting relic (1794). He showed all the interest, and took all the pains that were to be expected as to the education of his children. But early in 1795, he was already complaining that he felt "like an old man. In the January of 1796 he caught a rheumatic fever, his strength was broken, his robust figure was emaciated, a holiday by the Solway failed to restore him, poverty pressed him hard, a tradesman brought a suit against him for a small debt, his wife was about to give birth to a child, and so, in